When people hear of a helium leak, they likely imagine a comical scenario involving party balloons and high-pitched voices. Yet scientists from the California Institute of Technology and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution suspect that, like a human who has yet to fully burp out a gassy meal, Earth has pockets of helium from when it was formed that it has yet to fully release. They published their findings in a recent study in the journal Nature, and in the process may have redefined how researchers look at America's own geological history.
Helium is one of the most abundant elements in the entire universe, second only to hydrogen, so it's no surprise there was helium around when Earth first formed billions of years ago. Nonetheless, scientists have long operated under the assumption that any helium on Earth's surface would, because it is so light, eventually float into space or that the majority of the light noble gas would have been expelled during 4.6 billion years of volcanic eruptions. Or the helium could have been kicked off the planet by the large number of massive impacts our Earth has outlived, including the rock that crushed most of the dinosaurs and when the Moon was formed from a collision with a Mars-sized planet.
